how does money affect the standard of work ?
chris

chris bunting wrote:
No money - no work:)

beslagsmed wrote:
LOL. And vice versa.

Also: Good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two.

rubbish , good work always attracts work , my point being you should always produce the highest standard of work you are capable of regardless if you are getting paid for it or not
chris

chris bunting wrote:
True, and while you're right good work will bring a better quality of paying customers. This then will enable one to get rid of those who don't pay so well.

chris bunting wrote:
I'm not sure who the question is for but in my last post I said the better work and pay is nearer the cities. I was referring to working conditions...Nicer places to work, nicer horses to work on and clients willing to pay a good price.

As for the quality of horseshoeing it might not be as straight forward. Prices vary greatly from one area to another and from one farrier to the other. the correlation wouldn't be very good but I've seen some extremely poor work from the guys on the bottom of the scale. When I say "bad" I mean that you could do as well by laying a shoe on the ground with nails sticking up out of it and have the horse step on it. I haven't seen anything that bad from the higher priced guys though you may see some work that doesn't impress you.

But as I said, I've seen some pretty nice work from the Amish and nobody works for less money than they do.

I think farriers with a specialty can get more money just because the accounts that need those disciplines have far fewer farriers to choose from. We farriers might be able to pick some of the work apart but those farriers get the horses to the show while other farriers can't or won't.

If an individual farrier is in great demand for whatever reason, he can get a bunch of money because there's only one of him. a friend of mine is in that sort of demand. His prices are WAY up there and he always has more work than he can handle.

Is he the "best? How do we best measure such a thing? He does nice work and a great job of giving the horse and client what they need. The clients have confidence that he'll fix them up. Client confidence is as good as gold. I think you get client confidence by delivering the things that the clients can see and are most interested in...but the world is just overflowing with farriers that could do just as good or better job of nailing up a flat shod horse.

It think you have to look at the whole package.

chris bunting wrote:
"Good" has to measures in terms of what the client is looking for. If doing your absolute best fit and finish prevents you from getting everything done that the client needs done, you might get fired for it.

I lost an account a while back because they said it was taking me too long to get things done. It's mostly a breeding farm so I shod a lot of babies...weenlings, yearlings and so on. Lots of them were rank.

All the horses were often let go for a long time and feet would be a mile long, hard as a rock and as messed up as anything you could possibly imagine.

It wasn't exactly the kind of account you're sorry to see go but I did their work for several years. Heck, I did work for them 25 years ago. Everything was fine until my wife stopped riding with me.

Without my wife there, the only one in the barn to help with those horses was the owner and he had other things he wanted to do.

I didn't quit working on one until it was the way I thought it should be but he wasn't impressed by my great fit and finish. To make him happy, I needed to just get the shoes nailed on and got through the list.

I did a great job at what nobody cared about and I failed to give them what they wanted.

I think you'll find that what you think is "good work" isn't always what the client thinks is good work.

I wonder what those folks say about me if they say anything. I doubt they tell people that my work was too good. I'd guess they tell people that I couldn't get through enough horses in a day without telling them that the horses were KICKING MY AZZ! One thing is certain. I haven't been flooded with referrals from them. LOL

A mentor of mine keeps telling me not to sweat the small stuff. I've always had the hardest time following that advice but I think it's often really important. He's not suggesting that I should be "sloppy" but that I not spend too much time on stuff that doesn't matter to anybody except me.

I hated the place and just thinking about going there, literally, made me sick to my stomach but it really bothers me that I got fired from about the worst account that I know of.

beslagsmed wrote:
You're assuming that the lower quality, lower paying customers are running in the same circles and talking to eachother. That hasn't been my experience.

It hasn't been my experience that you can expect to work your way up from the lousy accounts to the good accounts. The lousy accounts tend to make you look lousy and, if anything, that'll prevent you from getting into the good accounts.

I just posted a big long exampe of that very thing. I think that if you want the good accounts you have to position yourself to start there. You might not start at the top and you might be shoeing the second string horses but they have to be good accounts otherwise they just make you look bad no matter how good your work is.

What is it they say about wrestling with a pig?

Mike Ferrara wrote:
Excellent point and one of the toughest aspects of business. Reading the customer!

Cheers,
Mark